The Face (5 page)

“I don’t understand,” he said, trying to look equally bewildered and afraid.

“I’ve seen your picture,” Reynerd told him.

Ethan glanced toward the open door, the hallway beyond.

“I don’t care who sees or hears,” Reynerd told him. “It’s all over anyhow, isn’t it?”

“Listen, if my brother George did something to piss you off,” Ethan said, trying to buy a little time.

Reynerd wasn’t selling. Even as Ethan dropped the notepad and reached for the 9-mm Glock under his jacket, the apple man shot him point-blank in the gut.

For a moment, Ethan felt no pain, but only for a moment. He rocked back in the chair and gaped at the gush of blood. Then agony.

He heard the first shot, but he didn’t hear the second. The slug hammered him dead-center in the chest.

Everything in the black-and-white apartment went black.

Ethan knew the birds still gathered on the walls, watching him die. He could feel the tension of their wings frozen in flight.

He heard a dicelike rattle again. Not rain against the window this time. His breath rattling in a broken throat.

No Christmas.

CHAPTER 3

E
THAN OPENED HIS EYES.

Traveling far too fast for a residential street, a cherry-red Ferrari Testarossa exploded past, casting up a plume of dirty water from the puddled pavement.

Through the side window of the Expedition, the apartment house blurred and tweaked into strange geometry, like a place in a nightmare.

As if he’d sustained an electrical shock, he twitched violently, and inhaled with the desperation of a drowning man. The air tasted sweet, fresh and sweet and clean. He exhaled explosively.

No gut wound. No chest wound. His hair wasn’t wet with rain.

His heart knocked, knocked like a lunatic fist on the padded door of a padded room.

Never in his life had Ethan Truman experienced a dream of such clarity, such intensity, nor any nightmare so crisply detailed as the experience in Reynerd’s apartment.

He consulted his wristwatch. If he’d been asleep, he had been dreaming for no more than a minute.

He couldn’t have explored the convolutions of such an elaborate dream in a mere minute. Impossible.

Rain washed the last of the murky residue off the glass. Beyond the dripping fronds of the phoenix palms, the apartment house waited, no longer distorted, but now forever strange.

When he’d leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes, the better to formulate his approach to Rolf Reynerd, Ethan had not been in the least sleepy. Or even tired.

He was certain that he had not taken a one-minute nap. He had not taken a five-second nap, for that matter.

If the first Ferrari had been a figment of a dream, the second sports car suggested that reality now followed precisely in the path of the nightmare.

Although his explosive breathing had quieted, his heart clumped with undiminished speed, galloping after reason, which set an even faster pace, steadily receding beyond reach.

Intuition told him to leave now, to find a Starbucks and have a large cup of coffee. Order a blend strong enough to dissolve the swizzle stick.

Given time and distance from the event, he would discover the key that unlocked the mystery and allowed understanding. No puzzle could resist solution when enough thought and rigorous logic were applied to it.

Even though years of police work had taught him to trust his intuition as a baby trusts its mother, he switched off the engine and got out of the Expedition.

No argument: Intuition was an essential survival tool. Honesty with himself, however, was more important than heeding intuition. In a spirit of honesty, he had to admit that he wanted to drive away not to find a place and time for quiet reflection, not to engage in Sherlockian deduction, but because fear had him in a pincer grip.

Fear must never be allowed to win. Surrender to it once, and you were finished as a cop.

Of course he wasn’t a cop anymore. He had left the force more than a year ago. The work that had given his life meaning while Hannah was alive had meant steadily less to him in the years after her death. He had ceased to believe that he could make a difference in the world. He had wanted to withdraw, to turn his back on the ugly reality of the human condition so evident in the daily work of a homicide detective. Charming Manheim’s world was as far as he could get from reality and still earn a living.

Although he didn’t carry a badge, although he might not be a cop in any official sense, he remained a cop in essence. We are what we are, no matter what we might wish to be, or pretend to be.

Hands shoved in the pockets of his leather jacket, shoulders hunched as if the rain were a burden, he dashed across the street to the apartment house.

Dripping, he entered the foyer. Mexican-tile floor. Elevator. Stairs. As it should be. As it had been.

Stale with the greasy scent of cooked breakfast meat and pot smoke, the air felt thick, seemed to cloy like mucus in his throat.

Two magazines lay in the tray. On each mailing label was the name George Keesner.

Ethan climbed the stairs. His legs felt weak, and his hands trembled. At the landing, he paused to take a few deep breaths, to knit the raveled fabric of his nerve.

The apartment house lay quiet. No voices muffled by the walls, no music for a melancholy Monday.

He imagined that he heard the faint tick and scrape of crow claws on an iron fence, the flap and rustle of pigeons taking flight, the
tick-tick-tick
of insistently pecking beaks. In truth, he knew that these were only the many voices of the rain.

Although he could feel the weight of the pistol in his shoulder holster, he reached under his coat and placed his right hand on the weapon to be certain that he had brought it. With one fingertip, he traced the checking on the grip.

He withdrew his hand from under his jacket, leaving the pistol in the holster.

Having collected hair by hair along the back of his head, rain reached a trickling finger down the nape of his neck, teasing a shudder from him.

When Ethan reached the second-floor hallway, he barely glanced at Apartment 2E, where George Keesner would fail to respond to either the bell or a knock, and he went directly to the door of 2B, where he lost his nerve, but only briefly.

The apple man answered the bell almost at once. Tall, strong, self-confident, he didn’t bother engaging the security chain.

He didn’t seem to be in the least surprised to see Ethan again or alive, as if their first encounter had never happened.

“Is Jim here?” Ethan asked.

“You’ve got the wrong apartment,” Reynerd said.

“Jim Briscoe? Really? I’m sure this was his place.”

“I’ve been here more than six months.”

Beyond Reynerd lay a black-and-white room.

“Six months? Has it been that long since I was here?” Ethan sounded false to himself, but he pressed forward. “Yeah, I guess that’s what it’s been, six or seven.”

On the wall opposite the door, an owl stared with immense eyes, in expectation of a gunshot.

Ethan said, “Hey, did Jim leave a forwarding address?”

“I never met the previous tenant.”

The hard shine in Reynerd’s eyes, the quick throbbing in his temple, the tightness at the corners of his mouth this time warned Ethan off.

“Sorry to have bothered you,” he said.

When he heard Reynerd’s television at low volume, the soft roar of the MGM lion, he hesitated no longer and headed directly for the stairs. He realized that he was retreating with suspicious haste, and he tried not to run.

Halfway down the stairs, at the landing, Ethan trusted instinct, turned, looked up, and saw Rolf Reynerd at the head of the stairs, silently watching him. The apple man had in his hand neither a gun nor a bag of potato chips.

Without another word, Ethan descended the last flight to the foyer. Opening the outer door, he glanced back, but Reynerd had not followed him to the lower floor.

Lazy no more, rain chased rain along the street, and cold wind blustered in the palms.

Behind the steering wheel of the Expedition again, Ethan started the engine, locked the doors, switched on the heater.

A strong double coffee at Starbucks no longer seemed adequate. He didn’t know where to go.

Premonition. Precognition. Psychic vision. Clairvoyance. The
Twilight Zone Dictionary
turned its own pages in the library of his mind, but no possibility that it presented to him seemed to explain his experience.

According to the calendar, winter would not officially arrive for another day, but it entered early in his bones. He contained a coldness unknown in southern California.

He raised his hands to look at them, never having known them to shake like this. His fingers were pale, each nail as entirely white as the crescent at its base.

Neither the paleness nor the tremors troubled Ethan half as much as what he saw beneath the fingernails of his right hand. A dark substance, reddish-black.

He stared at this material for a long time, reluctant to take steps to determine if it was real or hallucinated.

Finally he used the thumbnail of his left hand to scrape out a small portion of the matter that was trapped under the nail of his right thumb. The stuff proved slightly moist, gummy.

Hesitantly, he brought the smear to his nose. He sniffed it once, twice, and though the scent was faint, he didn’t need to smell it again.

Ethan had blood under all five nails of his right hand. With a certainty seldom given to any man who understood the world to be a most uncertain place, he knew that this would prove to be his own blood.

CHAPTER 4

P
ALOMAR LABORATORIES IN NORTH HOLLYWOOD occupied a sprawling single-story concrete-slab building with such small and widely spaced windows and with such a low and slightly pitched sheet-metal roof that it resembled a bunker in the storm.

The medical-lab division of Palomar analyzed blood samples, Pap smears, biopsies, and other organic materials. In their industrial division, they performed chemical analyses of every variety for both private-sector and government clients.

Each year, fans of the Face sent over a quarter of a million pieces of mail to him, mostly in care of his studio, which forwarded weekly batches of this correspondence to the publicity firm that responded to it in the star’s name. Among those letters were gifts, including more than a few homemade foods: cookies, cakes, fudge. Fewer than one in a thousand fans might be sufficiently deranged to send poisoned brownies, but Ethan nevertheless operated on the better-safe-than-sorry principle: All foodstuffs must be disposed of without sampling by anyone.

Occasionally, when a homemade treat from a fan arrived with a particularly suspicious letter, the edible goodie would not be at once destroyed but would be passed along to Ethan for a closer look. If he suspected contamination, he brought the item here to Palomar to be analyzed.

When a total stranger could work up sufficient hatred to attempt to poison the Face, Ethan wanted to know that the bastard existed. He subsequently cooperated with authorities in the poisoner’s hometown to bring whatever criminal charges might be sustained in court.

Now, proceeding first to the public reception lounge, he signed a form authorizing them to draw his blood. Lacking a doctor’s order for tests, he paid cash for the analyses he required.

He requested a basic DNA profile. “And I want to know if any drugs are present in my body.”

“What drugs are you taking?” the receptionist asked.

“Nothing but aspirin. But I want you to test for every possible substance, in case I’ve been drugged without my knowledge.”

Perhaps in North Hollywood they were accustomed to encounters with full-blown paranoids. The receptionist didn’t roll her eyes, raise an eyebrow, or in any other way appear to be surprised to hear him suggest that he might be the victim of a wicked conspiracy.

The medical technician who drew his sample was a petite and lovely Vietnamese woman with an angel’s touch. He never felt the needle pierce the vein.

In another reception lounge provided for the delivery of samples unrelated to standard medical tests, he filled out a second form and paid another fee. This receptionist did give him an odd look when he explained what he wanted to have analyzed.

At a lab table, under harsh fluorescent lights, a technician who resembled Britney Spears used a thin but blunt steel blade to scrape the blood from under the fingernails of his right hand, onto a square of acid-free white paper. Ethan hadn’t trimmed his nails in over a week, so she retrieved a significant number of shavings, some of which still appeared to be gummy.

His hand trembled throughout the process. She probably thought her beauty made him nervous.

The material from under his fingernails would first be tested to determine if it was indeed blood. Thereafter it would be conveyed to the medical-lab division to be typed and to have the DNA profile compared to the blood sample that the Vietnamese technician had drawn. Full toxicological results wouldn’t be ready until Wednesday afternoon.

Ethan didn’t understand how he could have his own blood under his fingernails when he had not, after all, been shot in the gut and the chest. Yet as migrating geese know south from north without the aid of a compass, he knew this blood was his.

CHAPTER 5

I
N THE PALOMAR PARKING LOT, AS THE RAIN AND the wind painted a procession of colorless spirit shapes on the windshield of the Expedition, Ethan placed a call to Hazard Yancy’s cell phone.

Hazard had been born Lester, but he loathed his given name. He didn’t like Les any better. He thought the shortened version sounded like an insult.

“I’m not
less
of anything than you are,” he’d once said to Ethan, but affably.

Indeed, at six feet four and 240 pounds, with a shaved head that appeared to be as big as a basketball and a neck only slightly narrower than the span of his ears, Hazard Yancy was nobody’s idea of a poster child for minimalism.

“Fact is, I’m
more
of a lot of things than some people. Like more determined, more fun, more colorful, more likely to make stupid choices in women, more likely to be shot in the ass. My folks should have named me More Yancy. I could’ve lived with that.”

When he had been a teenager and a young man, his friends had called him Brick, a reference to the fact that he was built like a brick wall.

Nobody in Robbery/Homicide had called him Brick in twenty years. On the force, he was known as Hazard because working a case in tandem with him could be as hazardous as driving a dynamite truck.

Gumshoe duty in Robbery/Homicide might be more dangerous than a career as a greengrocer, but detectives were less likely to die on the job than were night clerks in convenience stores. If you wanted the thrill of being shot at on a regular basis, the Gang Activities Section, the Narcotics Division, and certainly the Strategic Weapons and Tactics teams were better bets than cleaning up after murderers.

Even just staying in uniform promised more violence than hitting the streets in a suit.

Hazard’s career was an exception to the rule. People shot at him with regularity.

He professed surprise not at the frequency with which bullets were directed at him, but at the fact that the shooters were people who didn’t know him personally. “Being a friend of mine,” he once said, “you’d think it would be the other way around, wouldn’t you?”

Hazard’s uncanny attraction for high-velocity projectiles wasn’t a consequence of either recklessness or poor investigative technique. He was a careful, first-rate detective.

In Ethan’s experience, the universe didn’t always operate like the clockwork mechanism of cause and effect that the scientists so confidently described. Anomalies abounded. Deviations from the common rule, strange conditions, incongruities.

You could make yourself a little crazy, even certifiable, if you insisted that life always proceed according to some this-because-that system of logic. Occasionally you had to accept the inexplicable.

Hazard didn’t choose his cases. Like other detectives, he fielded what fate threw at him. For reasons known only to the secret master of the universe, he caught more investigations involving perps who were trigger-happy wackos than he caught cases in which genteel elderly women served poisoned tea to their gentlemen friends.

Fortunately, most shots fired at him missed. He’d been hit just twice: both minor wounds. Two of his partners had sustained injuries more serious than Hazard’s, but neither had died or been crippled.

Ethan had worked cases with Hazard during four years of his time on the force. That period constituted the most satisfying police work he’d ever done.

Now, when Yancy answered his cell phone on the third ring, Ethan said, “You still sleeping with an inflatable woman?”

“You applying for the position?”

“Hey, Hazard, you busy right now?”

“Got my foot on a snot-wad’s neck.”

“Literally?” Ethan asked.

“Figuratively. Was it literally, I’d be stomping his windpipe, and you’d have been forwarded to voice mail.”

“If you’re about to make a collar—”

“I’m waiting for a comeback from the lab. Won’t get it until tomorrow morning.”

“How about you and I have lunch, and Charming Manheim pays?”

“As long as that doesn’t oblige me to watch any of his shitcan movies.”

“Everyone’s a critic.” Ethan named a famous west-side restaurant where the Face had a standing reservation.

“They have real food or just interior decoration on a plate?” Hazard asked.

“There’s going to be fancy carved zucchini cups full of vegetable mousseline, baby asparagus, and patterns drawn with sauces,” Ethan admitted. “Would you rather go Armenian?”

“Do I have a tongue? Armenian at one o’clock?”

“I’ll be the guy looks like an ex-cop trying to pass for smart.”

When he pressed
END
, terminating the call, Ethan was surprised that he had managed to sound entirely normal.

His hands no longer trembled, but cold greasy fear still crawled restlessly through every turning of his guts. In the rearview mirror, his eyes weren’t entirely familiar to him.

Ethan engaged the windshield wipers. He drove out of the Palomar Laboratories parking lot.

In the witches’ cauldron of the sky, late-morning light brewed into a thick gloom more suitable to a winter dusk.

Most drivers had switched on their headlights. Bright phantom serpents wriggled across the wet black pavement.

With an hour and fifteen minutes to kill before lunch, Ethan decided to pay a visit to the living dead.